An hour later I leave to clean the sunroom. This is the children's playroom, now empty. Around me the carpet, the plastic chairs and tables are covered with the daytime patterns of childhood, lingering. Toys and pieces of toys lay here and there, always everywhere, weaving together messy spirals and rhythms and textures. Yellow, red, blue. Mini-houses, Ken heads, Fisher-Price farms, hollow plastic bulbs-some together, some not. I pick them up, one by one, and put them in their designated places. I used to work the evening shift here, just after supper, when the sunroom is full of children, of wet hair and pajamas; movement and noise; tricycles, story-books, gossip; house, cops, robbers; tossing, chasing, shouting. John, John, John, they called from all corners, all sides. The supervisor's big butt, Dan's booger, Kara's farts. Faster and faster, the kinetic energy of their play seemed to raise the small hairs on my neck and arms . . . But I'd forget. On the mat, near the television, would be the other patients like Dean. Quiet, except for tiny rockings from seizures or masturbation. Movement would flurry about them, balls would accidentally bounce off their heads as we nursing assistants played with the other children; all of us believing, hoping, that because these patients lay quietly, just breathing and rocking, they were pacified. With bright colors spinning around us, we would tuck them and their gnarled fingers into the back of our minds and forget them. But here on the night shift I remember.





*John T. Price recently received his MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. His essays will be appearing in North Dakota Quarterly and Echoes.